Last week, my friend and co-author, Fr. Drew Knowles, and I got to share a conversation with Peter Leithart for the Theopolis Institute Podcast to discuss our recent book, Hospitality: The Convivial Mission of God.
In the course of that discussion, we touched, briefly, on the idea of ‘conviviality’ and its relation to both hospitality and to the Triune God. Conviviality means literally “life-with-ing,” or, we might say more simply, “life together.”
What is Redemption if not the sharing life with, or doing life together with, the Blessed Trinity? And what is hospitality if not the act of getting the lives of other people all over your own?
Lest we be tempted to render “life together” as overly abstract or disembodied, consider the simple act of being welcomed into the home of another for a meal and all of the deeply intimate, viscerally physical ways in which our lives participate each in the other:
As soon as I walk into a home my breath, my odors, my children (their odors), all that rests on the bottom of my heel —everything which composes that contagious chemical “me”— gets all over the place. And the place gets all over me, too. The dust, the invisible thousands of particles, the rub of the sofa, all that rests on the handles of the doors, the air of that place, all enter into my life.
I am offered water, and I receive it. The sweat of my palms wipes the glass and my lips run the lip of the cup. The water transforms by metabolism into more of myself. I am in the house, and now, at least in part, the house is in me.
We exchange food, we brush shoulders, we pass dishes, we hold hands for prayer, we share stories of ourselves, we make new stories for our future selves with the other selves around the table. We watch one another behave in this shared environment and respond with our own behaviors.
Later, after the meal, we can smell the breath of one another carrying the olfactory witness of mutual digestion. We drink hot things, singeing and burning our tongues on the heat —wounded together in our common comforts.
Somone rises from the chair to offer their seat to me. I sit and feel the residue of their body-heat. Their body heat becomes my body heat.
We pray and bid farewell, bidding blessings over one another in the hopes of sharing another repast —of doing this again. For, as Jacques Lacan observed, “[l]ove demands love […] It demands it… encore” (as quoted in Recalcati, p.7).
Hospitality, ever generous, turns behind the now closed door, and labors-on still. The bit of fishbone and mayonnaise on the edge of my plate (or now, a plate that will forever in some way be mine, the plate to which I belong in part), the uneaten revenant of salad, and the extra sauce, must be cleaned and scrapped into the rubbish. Part of what I left “all over” must be washed, scrubbed, and swept away. I am still joining my host even though I leave: I join what goes in their trashcan.
Perhaps I brought home a little of them with me ? A piece of pie, a packed lunch of leftovers in reused Tupperware for tomorrow. And I wash the bowl of what remains of the dish my wife made.
Love calls us to this. We love and co-feast. It is our way in the world. God has invited us into his world, and we have gotten all over it, and it is all over us. Tomorrow the sun will rise and that Great Host will proclaim, “let us do it all over again!” and we will again share in his world. That sharing is unavoidable. It is who we are, the image-bearers of the Host. But we can share ruinously or goodly; humbly or with all of the pride of the Devil who sees in the Feast of existence only more things to raise against the Almighty.
Love Himself came down, the Host came down to play the Guest, and got himself all mixed-up among us: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands” (1 John 1:1). Let us, in all our sharing and getting one another’s life all over each other, do so according to the Gospel, do so like Jesus; let all our fellowshipping be “with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ […] so that our joy may be complete” (1 John 1:3-4).
Let us be good to one another.